We handpick and explain the most important stories at the intersection of climate, land, food and nature over the past fortnight.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s fortnightly Cropped email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
Key developments
Forests under fire
‘ONEROUS REQUIREMENTS’: A letter from 18 EU member states called for the bloc to “delay and further simplify” the forthcoming application of new rules to curb global deforestation, according to Bloomberg. The letter said the regulation, due to take effect in December, “does not sufficiently take into account countries with effective forest protection laws and a negligible risk of causing deforestation”, the outlet said. The Financial Times added that Indonesia also demanded EU “policymakers cut back on ‘onerous’ requirements”, citing the challenges facing smallholder farmers and producers.
‘ILLICIT TIMBER TRADE’: Illegal loggers are “profit[ing] from Brazil’s carbon credit projects”, Reuters analysis found. Companies have invested “hundreds of millions of dollars” into these conservation projects. But at least 24 of 36 projects in the Brazilian Amazon examined by the newswire “involved landowners, developers or forestry firms that have been punished by Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama for their roles in illegal deforestation”. Offences ranged from “clear-cutting the rainforest without authorisation” to “entering false information in a government timber tracking system”, Reuters said. It is a “failure of the whole idea”, said Raoni Rajão, who formerly ran Brazil’s environment ministry’s programme combating deforestation.
WILDFIRES ABLAZE: Elsewhere, wildfires “fanned” by extreme heat across France, Spain, Greece and other parts of Europe resulted in forced evacuations and “major firefighting operations”, the Independent reported. According to Reuters, 227,000 hectares of land has burned in Europe since the beginning of 2025, “more than double the average for this time of year over the past two decades”. More than 100 wildfires burned in a central Canadian province, the New York Times said, while fires in a Syrian coastal mountain region “overwhelm[ed]” emergency services, according to CNN.
Ag emissions projected to rise
EMISSIONS INCREASE: A new report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimated that the growth of farming and livestock production worldwide will increase the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions by 6% by 2034. However, yield improvements derived from changed farming practices mean that global agricultural carbon intensity will actually decrease over the next decade, the report found. FAO director general Qu Dongyu said in a press release: “Lower carbon intensity of agrifood systems is also welcome, but we can do better.”
LIVESTOCK IMPACT: According to the report, the main drivers of the expected rise in emissions include the increase of ruminants and livestock (70% of the projected global emissions), followed by the use of synthetic fertilisers (28%), rice cultivation and other activities, such as burning crop residues. The largest increases are expected in south Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, the report said. Agricultural emissions are projected to rise in these two regions by 14% and 8%, respectively, by 2034, partly due to the expansion of ruminant herds, it noted.
YIELD DISPARITY: The report also estimated that current differences in agricultural yields between developed and developing countries will not have “significant changes” over the next decade. For instance, yields of maize are higher in North America, compared to the rest of the world. This is attributed to several factors, including gaps in access to finance and modern technologies, the report noted. The authors offered solutions for increasing agricultural yields while mitigating emissions from the sector, including increasing productivity, manure management and addressing both production and consumption of livestock products.
Spotlight
Climate impacts for US lobsters
This week, Carbon Brief food, land and nature reporter Orla Dwyer explores how climate change is impacting US lobsters, after recently attending a science workshop as part of the Metcalf Fellowship at the University of Rhode Island.
Scaly? Check. Covered in scabs resembling cigarette burns? Check. Yes, that lobster has epizootic shell disease – and climate change is making it worse.
This disease – first recorded in the north-eastern US region of New England in the 1990s – acts as a “manifestation of an environment that is increasingly inhospitable to lobsters,” said Dr Ben Gutzler, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm in Maine.
He told Carbon Brief that the disease is one indication of the “stress” lobsters are under due to warmer ocean conditions, which leave them more vulnerable to these kinds of ailments.
Gutzler co-authored new research that assessed more than 1,000 peer-reviewed studies on American lobsters published over the past 25 years.
The research found that epizootic shell disease currently affects as much as half of lobsters in parts of southern New England, where overall lobster numbers have plummeted in recent decades.
Warmer oceans fuelled the spread of the disease-causing bacteria, Gutzler said, telling Carbon Brief:
“The warmer water leads to faster microbial growth, because everything happens faster at warmer temperatures…Once [lobsters] get a nick on their shell that provides that portal of entry, the microbes can just go gangbusters.”
The disease causes lesions to form on a lobster’s shell and can reduce their growth and impact reproduction. In severe cases, the sores grow, spread beneath the shell and enter the lobster’s tissue, eventually damaging their internal organs and gills.
’Leprosy’ lobsters
Carbon Brief recently spoke to researchers at the University of Rhode Island about the impact climate change is having on lobsters in New England, where the vast majority of the US lobster industry is located.
They explained that lobsters are cold-water creatures, generally most comfortable in waters of around 16C. The north-eastern Atlantic waters are warming faster than the global average and lobsters in the region are struggling as a result.
Although epizootic shell disease looks unpleasant, Gutzler said that it does not impact the taste of a lobster:
“It just becomes annoying for the fishermen, because nobody wants to eat a lobster that looks like it has leprosy.”
This disease is far from the only way lobsters are affected by the impacts of climate change. Warmer, more acidic oceans are impacting the areas in which lobsters settle and grow in abundance. Gutzler added:
“There’s a whole suite of things driven by ocean temperature that all add up to: it’s harder to be a lobster and successfully complete your life cycle in this new thermal regime.”
News and views
POLICY CONTRADICTIONS: Labour proposals to “weaken environmental regulations for small housebuilders” in the UK would exempt 97% of planning approvals from the “requirement to replace destroyed nature”, the Guardian reported. The plans could “destroy 215,000 hectares of nature in England”, it added. Meanwhile, the UK government released a new food strategy for England, promising to “improve environment and health”, according to BusinessGreen. The strategy “promises [a] wave of fresh policies to tackle emissions [and] curb nature impacts”, the outlet said, adding that campaigners “have repeatedly warned the UK remains off track to meet targets to reverse nature loss by 2030”.
‘GREEN GREAT WALL’: China has completed a “sand control belt” that spans the Badain Jaran, Tenegger and Ulan Buh deserts in the westernmost part of Inner Mongolia, according to the South China Morning Post. The green belt, stretching 1,856km, represents the “latest phase” in China’s “decades-long efforts to curb desertification”, the outlet said. Similar projects to combat desertification include Africa’s ‘Great Green Wall Initiative’, which China supports through “sharing technology expertise and funding”, it added.
SALTY: Thousands of salt farmers in the western India state of Gujarat are undertaking an “unlikely green revolution” by switching from diesel to solar-powered water pumps, JUST Stories reported. The outlet noted that 80% of India’s salt is produced in Gujarat, where the “vast majority” of salt workers are women. The salt pan workers, known as Agariyas, have been “steadily replacing” their pumps with help from a self-employed women’s trade union, the outlet said. Mary Robinson, climate advocate and former president of Ireland, said this initiative is “one of the most stunning examples of a truly just transition”.
ALL OVER THE WORLD: A report from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification found that the 2023-24 drought, which was exacerbated by El Niño, affected wide swathes of the planet, including the Mediterranean, Amazon basin, Panama, Mexico and south-east Asia. According to the report, the drought’s impacts varied by region, but generally included water supply shortages, agricultural failures and power rationing. Human and livestock deaths were recorded in eastern Africa, while the Amazon released more carbon into the atmosphere as a result of the drought.
HYDRO-POWERED: Women in Somalia who have been displaced by conflict and climate change are growing spinach, tomatoes and leafy greens with hydroponics, instead of planting them in the soil, Deutsche Welle reported. The hydroponics project was launched by the not-for-profit SOS Children’s Villages in 2022 in “response to the country’s worsening droughts and floods, which have devastated traditional agriculture”. The project is carried out in 41 solar-powered greenhouses and allows women to earn up to €43 a month, per person. The outlet quoted a farmer who said: “These beautiful farms have changed our lives.”
Watch, read, listen
SWEET COEXISTENCE: Euronews Green explored whether wild pollinators and honeybees can co-exist and assessed the risk of pollinator extinction in the EU.
‘MEDIOCRE’ MILK: A joint investigation by DeSmog and the Premium Times examined how a milk powder produced using Irish dairy is being sold in west Africa under a “carefully constructed” image of being “healthy and sustainable”.
BIG SHIFT: This NPR Short Wave podcast addressed how ocean currents, such as the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, are shifting due to climate change.
PLANT POWER: The Guardian spoke to “rainforest gardeners” at a botanical sanctuary in Kerala, which is a “haven for more than 2,000 native plant species from southern India”.
New science
- A new review article, published in Nature, found that marine heatwaves have intensified since around 1980 due to human-driven climate change, resulting in “biological, ecological and socioeconomic change in almost all oceans and seas”. The authors wrote that reducing greenhouse gas emissions is the “only long-term solution”.
- A PLOS One study found that 80% of areas with the highest potential for flowering plant discoveries in Brazil are not within protected areas, but 50% of them lie in Indigenous lands. The study highlighted the “urgent need” to expand collection efforts, protected areas and collaboration with Indigenous peoples, the authors said.
- Cropland productivity “stagnated” in most parts of southern Africa over the past 20 years, according to research published in Nature Food. The findings are in contrast to official crop statistics and, although climate change influenced annual fluctuations in productivity, the study authors said climate trends do not explain the stagnation.
In the diary
- 7-25 July: 30th session of the International Seabed Authority (part two) | Kingston, Jamaica
- 23-31 July: 15th meeting of the conference of the contracting parties to the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands | Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe
- 24 July: EU-China summit | Beijing
- 27-29 July: Second UN food systems summit stocktake | Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Cropped is researched and written by Dr Giuliana Viglione, Aruna Chandrasekhar, Daisy Dunne, Orla Dwyer and Yanine Quiroz. Please send tips and feedback to cropped@carbonbrief.org
The post Cropped 16 July 2025: EU deforestation law pushback; Agri emissions; US lobster disease appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Cropped 16 July 2025: EU deforestation law pushback; Agri emissions; US lobster disease
Climate Change
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
The clean energy sector is showing resilience despite challenges thrown at it by a hostile White House, a recent report found. A string of legal victories has further dampened the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind and solar power.
The Trump administration has abandoned its effort to halt wind energy projects across the United States and dropped its challenge to the court ruling that tossed President Donald Trump’s order freezing federal permitting and leasing for wind projects. States that challenged the order hailed the development as one of the most significant legal victories against the Trump White House’s campaign against the energy transition.
Trump Administration Abandons Fight Against Wind Energy as Clean Energy Output Surges
Amid reports that the government could weaken the UK’s electric vehicle (EV) targets, Carbon Brief analysis reveals the nation’s EV drivers are saving more than £1,100 a year in fuel costs, compared with running a petrol car.
Battery EVs (BEVs) are roughly four times more efficient than combustion-engine cars, making them far cheaper to run – particularly since the Iran crisis caused a spike in fossil-fuel prices.
The savings from driving BEVs are also more than three times higher than for “plug-in” hybrids (PHEVs), which evidence shows are mostly driven with their combustion engines.
In total, the more than 2m BEVs, 1m PHEVs and 100,000 electric vans on UK roads are saving drivers around £3bn a year, Carbon Brief’s analysis shows, as illustrated in the figure below.
In addition, these EVs are avoiding the need for nearly 2.5bn litres of fuel and cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by nearly 7m tonnes each year.
Despite recent news that EVs are now cheaper to buy than petrol cars, as well as having far lower running costs, BBC News says the government is “set to water down” its EV sales targets.
The broadcaster explains that the current goal, under the UK’s “zero-emissions vehicle” (ZEV) mandate, is for 80% of new car sales to be BEVs by 2030.
It says that the government is set to consult on weakening this to between 50% and 70%, following “lobbying” by carmakers and trade unions.
According to the Sunday Times, prime minister Keir Starmer “is understood to have overruled the energy secretary [Ed Miliband] after sustained pressure from industry, the Unite union and Peter Kyle, the business secretary”.
The car industry has consistently claimed there is insufficient demand for BEVs to meet the targets under the ZEV mandate, yet the government says manufacturers have “over-complied” to date. Independent analysts say the industry is on track to continue beating the ZEV mandate goals.
The industry has been able to beat its targets by using a wide range of “flexibilities”, which were introduced after a previous round of lobbying. These allow carmarkers to meet part of their EV targets by selling more efficient combustion cars, such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids.
The ZEV mandate is the single-largest part of the government’s plans to meet its legally binding climate goals over the next decade.
The advisory Climate Change Committee (CCC) previously warned that the extra flexibilities would result in a larger number of hybrids being sold, at the expense of battery EVs.
When it consulted on the ZEV mandate in 2023, the then-Conservative government noted that PHEVs do not deliver the cost and CO2 savings they are advertised with.
It pointed to “dramatic” differences between the performance of PHEVs in test cycles and what they deliver under real-world conditions.
In practice, less than a third of miles driven in PHEVs are fuelled by electricity, with petrol making up the rest. As a result, cost and CO2 savings from BEVs are three times larger than for PHEVs.
The post Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: UK’s EV drivers are now saving £1,100 each a year – and £3bn in total
Civil society groups have called for an investigation into the first carbon credits approved under a new UN mechanism, alleging the project is linked to Myanmar’s military junta – which the UN says is guilty of human rights abuses – and has “massively” overstated its climate impact.
The programme, which aims to cut emissions by distributing efficient cookstoves across Myanmar, received approval to issue around 650,000 carbon credits from the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body in February, in a landmark moment for the Paris Agreement’s carbon market. Only two projects have been given the green light by the mechanism’s regulator so far.
But two reports published last week, led by the Global Forest Coalition and Brussels-based NGO Carbon Market Watch, raised serious concerns about the project’s implementation in conflict zones where civilians have faced airstrikes and mass displacement as well as its emission-reduction calculations.
Project continued after military coup
Myanmar has been ravaged by a brutal civil war since the country’s military overthrew the democratically elected government in a coup d’état in February 2021. The military regime has attacked civilian populations, persecuted ethnic minorities and committed widespread sexual violence, among other serious human rights violations, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Myanmar said in April.
The cookstove programme started in 2018 under the previous UN-run carbon offsetting scheme – the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) – as a partnership between Myanmar’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Conservation (MONREC) and the Climate Change Center (CCC), a South Korean NGO, with investment from private South Korean firms.
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Some European, small island and other nations argue the forthcoming roadmap should be part of UN climate talks, while Russia has resisted this idea
The project continued operating after the coup. For most of the period between 2021 and 2022 in which the issued credits were generated, MONREC was led by Colonel Khin Maung Yi, who was sanctioned by the European Union in 2021 for supporting the military regime, the Global Forest Coalition report said.
CCC acknowledged engaging with government authorities after the coup but said this “should not be interpreted as political endorsement” of the junta. The South Korean NGO added that abandoning the programme when political circumstances changed “would not necessarily have been the most responsible outcome for the households involved”.
Conflict prevents on the ground verification
The Global Forest Coalition report raised particular concerns about the project’s implementation in Myanmar’s central Dry Zone, including Sagaing Region, an anti-junta resistance stronghold that has been most heavily affected by the conflict and routinely targeted by airstrikes and violent attacks. The region accounts for more than a third of Myanmar’s 3.8 million internally displaced people.
The NGOs said that, in addition to ethical concerns about carbon credits being produced by the military government in an area actively affected by its attacks, this raises questions over the ability to effectively verify the climate integrity of the projects.
Before carbon credits are issued, external auditors need to validate the claims made by project developers and confirm that the emission reductions claimed are correct. This process usually includes site visits to a representative sample of households to check how the improved cookstoves are being used.
But, because of the “volatile political situation” in Myanmar, the auditing team was not able to leave the capital Yangon and could only speak to project participants remotely via Zoom, project documents show.
“Due to ongoing armed conflict on the ground, the data currently used to justify carbon credit issuance in Sagaing by the Burmese military junta is unverifiable and highly likely fraudulent,” said Zaw Tuseng, founder and president of the Myanmar Policy Institute, which contributed to the report, in a written statement. “This demands an immediate suspension of credit transfers until a neutral, conflict-sensitive audit can be conducted.”
“Exceptional circumstances”
CCC told Climate Home News that, although it recognises that on-site verification is “generally preferable, particularly in complex operating environments”, the decision to opt for remote controls was not taken “as a discretionary shortcut, but as an approved alternative under exceptional circumstances”.
The South Korean NGO added that it reviewed the feasibility of the project at community level “on an ongoing basis” and it “did not identify conflict-related incidents that directly affected project implementation activities in participating communities during the monitoring period”.
A spokesperson for the UN climate change body told Climate Home News that, when site access is not possible, the UN carbon credit mechanism allows for “alternative verification approaches while still maintaining conservative assumptions and environmental integrity safeguards”. “These provisions ensure that crediting can only proceed where evidence is reliable,” they added.
Contested methodology
Carbon markets are seen as an important channel to raise money to help low-income communities in developing countries switch to less polluting cooking methods, both reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality. But several cookstove offsetting projects have faced criticism from researchers and campaigners who argue that climate benefits are often exaggerated and weak monitoring can undermine claims of real emission reductions.
The project in Myanmar uses a contested methodology developed under the earlier Kyoto Protocol that was rejected last year by The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM), a watchdog that issues quality labels to carbon credit types, because it found it “insufficiently rigorous”.
EU carbon credits could supercharge world’s clean cooking push, France says
After transitioning from the CDM to the new mechanism, the project was required to apply “more conservative” assumptions to calculate emission reductions, which resulted in 40% fewer credits being issued, according to the UN climate change body.
“The result is consistent with environmental integrity requirements and ensures that each credited tonne genuinely represents a tonne reduced and contributes to the goals of the Paris Agreement,” Mkhuthazi Steleki, the South African chair of the Article 6.4 Supervisory Body, which oversees the mechanism, said in February.
Too many credits issued
But Carbon Market Watch claimed in a second report last week that, despite the adjustment, the project is still likely to issue seven times more credits than its real climate impact justifies, comparing its calculations with values from peer-reviewed scientific literature.
The biggest driver of the credit inflation, the group said, is the failure to account for “stacking” – the widespread practice of households using multiple stoves at the same time, including more polluting ones the project does not monitor.
Peer-reviewed science considers a stacking rate of 68% a conservative assumption, but the methodology used by the Myanmar programme makes no allowance for it at all, the report said.
CCC disputed those findings. In a written response to Climate Home News, it said the project was developed under methodologies approved within the UN climate framework and that external recalculations by researchers are not “determinative of the level of crediting achieved”.
The credits are expected to be used primarily by major South Korean polluters to meet obligations under the country’s emissions trading system – a move that will also enable the government to count those units toward emissions reduction targets in its nationally determined contribution (NDC), the UN climate body told Climate Home News.
Myanmar will use the remaining credits to achieve in part the goals of its own national climate plan under the Paris Agreement.
“Over-crediting, at any magnitude, cannot be compatible with the climate ambition of a world striving to limit global warming to 1.5ºC,” said Isa Mulder, an expert at Carbon Market Watch.
The post UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns appeared first on Climate Home News.
UN’s first Paris Agreement carbon credits face human rights and climate concerns
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